


What Happened To Ivanova's Mom? (Part 1)

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [97]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Backstory, Canon Compliant, Childhood Trauma, Essays, Fix-It, Gen, Parental Death, Psi Corps, Secrets, Sleepers, Suicide, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-22
Updated: 2018-03-22
Packaged: 2019-04-06 10:55:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14055426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: Canon has some major inconsistencies in the story of Ivanova's mom, and I iron that out.The prologue ofBehind the Glovesishere- please read!





	What Happened To Ivanova's Mom? (Part 1)

**Author's Note:**

> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

The purpose of the following essay is to place all the relevant information in the same place, so 1) my readers can see where I'm getting everything (and why), and 2) readers who would like to link to a site that explains all this have a go-to link.

  * Canon is internally inconsistent with basic facts such as dates and ages, so let's clear that part up first.



        There are two versions of the story as given in canon.

**The first, as given in _Midnight on the Firing Line_ , _Eyes_ , _Legacies_ and _Divided Loyalties_ is as follows:**

         Sophie Ivanova had been a telepath since her youth, but was not known to the Corps. They discovered her on her 35th birthday, by which point she was married with two children. Susan, the younger, was old enough to have made telepathic contact with her mother (Susan is a latent telepath), and to remember this. Sophie chose to go on sleeper drugs. Susan was old enough to remember her mother before sleepers. She remembered a man in a grey suit coming to their home once a week to give her mom the injections, and she remembered her mother's decline. This went on for ten years, after which her mother took her own life.

        This puts Ivanova's age at the time of her mother's death at about sixteen. This is also consistent with the order of events as given in _Soul Hunter_ \- Sophie died, Ganya died in the Earth-Minbari War, and then Susan enlisted in EarthForce against the wishes over her father. She says in _Sic Transit Vir_ that she enlisted in 2247. And the age of enlistment (as given in _Eyes_ ) is seventeen, so her mother died when she was about sixteen.

**The second, as given only in one episode, _The Long Night_ , is as follows:**

        Susan Ivanova was ten when her mother committed suicide. She was playing with her dolls when her mother sent her to visit her cousin Magda. Her father was at work. When Susan got home, her father was there, along with some other people, and he said that her mother had gone away. Later she found out what had happened.

        If her mother had been on the drugs for ten years, however, then Susan would never have been able to remember her mother before the drugs, let alone make telepathic contact with her, something she talks about in several episodes.

        It's not possible for Susan to be both ten and sixteen at the same time, and it's not likely she's playing with dolls at sixteen.

       Since there are four episodes that support one version of events and only one that supports the other, _Behind the Gloves_ goes with the first version. **Susan was sixteen. Her father was at work, her brother was off fighting in the war, and her mother sent her out to her cousin's house - but she wasn't ten, and she wasn't playing with dolls.** The short time in between the loss of Sophie, the loss of Ganya, and Susan leaving to go off to the military (over her father's wishes) was super difficult for her father, which I get into later.

  * What's this about "beating the tests?"



         Another problem with the "Susan was ten" version is that only 5% of telepaths, including those born to two telepath parents, develop telepathy before puberty - so there would be few tests in school her mother would have supposedly "taught her to beat" before she died. She was just too young.

         Again, we're going with the version where Susan is older. While I can't say her mother didn't try to teach her "beat the tests" in some way, Susan, as she admits in _Divided Loyalties_ , is not even a P1.

        "She taught me how to fool the tests given at school, always staying one step ahead of the Psi Corps. I'm probably not even a P1. I've never been able to read anyone except my mother. I can pick up on feelings sometimes. I can block a casual scan and I know instantly if someone's doing it. But nothing more."

        As she says in that same scene, "I'm a [latent telepath](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10978596)." But what she says next is **not true** : "But that's enough for the Psi Corps to come pull you in."

        She doesn't even have a rating, let alone meet the cut-off for the Corps. [Lyta's mom](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10804515) was a P2 - born in the Corps to a very important mother in a Psi Corps "old family," Natasha Alexander - and even though both her parents were telepaths, and she'd been raised in the Corps since birth, she was never allowed to be in the Corps because her rating was too low.

        (Sorry Susan Ivanova, you're just not that important to them. You didn't "beat the tests" - there was nothing there to find.)

        Perhaps her mother taught her what she believed was a way to beat the tests in case one day, Susan did develop stronger telepathy. But it's not even likely that her mother had "beat the tests" - Susan describes her mother in _Midnight on the Firing Line_ with, "She wasn't trained, couldn't use it well." Which means not well enough to "beat the tests," if such a thing is even possible. There's only one example given in canon of someone who did beat the tests - [Kevin Vacit](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12056229), Bester's grandfather, who is above P12. (But more later on what might have happened with Ivanova's mom, and how she wasn't found.)

  * So Susan says something vague about "always staying one step ahead of the Psi Corps" - what's that mean? Was she always "on the move" to avoid detection?



        While it's possible that Sophie and her family moved frequently before she (Sophie) was discovered, from that point on, it's not likely. Remember, a man came to their house once a week to give her injections.

        For ten years.

        The Corps knew where the family was.

        And they also knew that Sophie had two children.

        No, Susan's existence was no secret to the Corps.

        In _Ship of Tears_ , Bester tells her:

        "You know, when I first came to Babylon 5, I studied your record. Terrible pity about your mother. But she took her own life. It wasn't the Corps that did it."

 **That "record" he's talking about? That's the record Psi Corps opened on her when she was six. When her mother was registered, they made files for her two children as well, in case those children should turn out to be telepaths.** Neither child was strong enough to get a rating, so the files are pretty empty - but he was able to find out about her mom by locating her name in their database and seeing she was Sophie Ivanova's daughter.

        Susan wasn't "hiding from them." They just didn't care about her, because she's not even a P1, and they have better things to do with their time and money. All along, they had a (mostly empty) file on her, and all along, there was no consequence to her career. [Even after she tried to kill a telepath on Io.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10507632)

        And the existence of this file didn't stop her brother from serving in EarthForce, either.

        B5Vault (supposedly a 100% canon source, though there are plenty of errors throughout) even goes so far as to say, "After Sofie [sic] was identified by the Corps circa 2236, she ensured that Susan kept on the move, ahead of the T-tests [sic], by educating her abroad. She studied at Lycée Voltaire in Paris in her teens."

**Psssst: They have the Psi Corps in Paris.**

        I can't say she didn't study there - but I can say that this couldn't have been related to keeping the Corps from "knowing about her."

        Note also the date: 2236. Ivanova enlists at 17 in 2247. She was born in 2230. **She was six when her mother went on sleepers, and sixteen when her mother died. Not ten.**

  * So how did her mom avoid detection?



        Canon never tells us, but here's a plausible back story. Perhaps she was born and raised in some remote part of Russia where they didn't test very often. That happens in small, remote villages. Susan grows up in St. Petersburg, but if her mother had also grown up there, she would have been tested. So maybe she grew up in a small town in a remote place.

        She was also a fairly weak telepath - probably not even a P5. (Yes, she was untrained, but if she "couldn't use it well," she was probably also on the weak end.) Once she was past school age, when there would be no more tests, she moved to the city, and stayed away from jobs where they would test (most jobs don't). She didn't go to university. And so no one except her family ever knew - till one day, for some reason, she ended up in the presence of another telepath, who noticed what she was - and having no idea why she was passing as a normal (harmless unregistered telepath? criminal rogue?) he or she reported her to the Corps. The end.

        As for why Ivanova says her mother had to take sleepers in order to stay with her family - that piece is unexplained. It's not Corps regulations - marriages in the Corps have to be approved (a point I address in much more depth later in _Behind the Gloves_ ), but they cannot undo a marriage that is already legal. They could send her away for training, but this would be short-term, and if the family lives in St. Petersburg, the Corps would have an office in the city.

        I address a possible solution later.


End file.
